


Brutally Murdered Rad Family Member

by inkpink



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Abuse, Gen, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-09-26 12:06:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9895793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkpink/pseuds/inkpink
Summary: Set after Dave finds Bro dead in LoWaS.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Rose2495’s song “Heroes Don’t Let People Die” on Soundcloud.

Well, shit.

Bro’s cornsilk hair is soaked with blood, the roots sticky and crimson with it. If you didn’t know him well, you’d bet a stain so vivid in hair so pale would never wash out. 

You’ve seen enough blood smudged into his hairline and gone by the next day to know better. There’s a thin trickle of it down the hard line of his jaw, so different from your own delicate one. His chest swells proudly in spite of the katana piercing it. You can smell death and sweat and cheap cologne, the smell of fear and childhood. Those have always been kind of the same thing in your mind.

This whole situation sends uneasy jitters up your spine. It’s the same feeling you get when you forget to check the closets, windows, and doors of a room. Like time is flurrying around you. Like you can’t quite catch your breath. He’s always lurking somewhere, never  _ still _ , except somehow now he is. Your gut knots with the wrongness of it.

The shadows of the Land and Wind and Shade only serve to put you more on edge. The very world around you is tenebrous and insubstantial. There’s barely enough light to see your own hand a foot from your face. Everything else drops off into this infuriating shade of dusky twilight. The smothering scent of oil hangs heavy in the air, broken only by the sharply metallic aroma of blood. Craggy purple rocks find their way beneath your feet and send you sprawling into the dust. Everything from your eyesight to your sense of smell is thoroughly, irrevocably, fucked. You have no idea what could be hiding among those starbright mushrooms. Lemon yellow salamanders aren’t the half of it. Your shades buzz insistently at you, but you ignore them for the time being. You steal a second glance at the limp form of what was once your guardian. He is so still. 

You crouch and reach a hand out to touch him. A part of you is terrified that he’ll spring back to life and rip off your index finger. Nevertheless, you rest a single trembling finger just above where the sword is sheathed in his ribcage. For some reason, you can’t stop shaking. Probably because you’ve eaten nothing but apple juice and ramen in the last three days, but that’s nothing new.

The bloodstain blooming outwards from the center of his white polo almost compliments how tan he is. The wet fabric clings to his body like a zipper on jeans. It’s beautiful in a fascinatingly morbid way, like the jars of crows that crown your bedroom shelves. You don’t know if you’d rather grab your camera or never look back at him again. 

You can see the caption now:  _ Macabre Manbro Shish-Kebabed, Local Twink Dubs ‘Modern Art.’   _ You snort to yourself a little. Finding aesthetic appeal in a dead relative has to be the result of some kind of condition. Better file that one away under Things To Never Tell Lalonde. The list has been growing exponentially these days. 

Heart flapping mutinously in your chest, you inspect the angular lines of his face. 

His pointy shades are barely scratched. You kind of want to shatter them yourself, but that’d be sinking to a level of unironic jealousy you are not down to deal with right now. His collar’s still flipped up too. That same sparse blonde soul patch that he’s had for as long as you can remember clings to his chin. Honest to God, there’s still sweat drying on his brow. You must have been barely minutes too late to save him. Hell, there’s still a sunburn peeling on his cheeks. It’s like staring a stuffed tiger in the eyes at the museum in Houston. A predator, buried beneath hairspray, glass eyes, and dead weight. 

For an odd moment, you envy the dead man at your feet. He looks peaceful in a way life never painted him. All tension is gone from his lean layers of muscle. The biceps that used to choke you lie ragdoll-still. He could be dreaming or dead. 

You don’t remember the last time you slept.

You’ve never thought of Bro as capable of being killed, saved, or anything mundanely human like that. The only tip-off that he even needed to eat was the amount he bitched at you for filching his stale Doritos. He’s a force of nature. Unstoppable, indomitable. 

An awful, rattling noise registers at the edge of your thoughts. It sounds like…

It sounds like you. You’re the one making that pitiful sound. 

You’re not  _ sad _ , dammit, you’re dazed and relieved and guilty from the relief. The whole goddamn rush of it is pulsing like a fresh, clean slice from a katana. Your entire body feels like when you broke your ankle in third grade: hot and awful and like something is missing. 

You broke it, that’s right. You were playing on the roof, weren't you? That’s what you told all the kids at school - what you told Rose and Jade and John when they asked why you’d been sleeping so much more. No foul fucking play involved. Just a dumb eight year old and a long, Texan summer. No one snapping your bones like toothpicks against burning concrete. That shit’s preposterous. 

You should hate the asshole dead in front of you, but you can't, you don't care. You’re eight years old again and you’re howling for Bro to hold your hand even though he’s the shithead who broke the other. You want him back because there’s no one else to be there. You want him alive because you cannot comprehend a world in which he is capable of dying. You always were an ungrateful bitch, just like he said between commercials and paychecks and sips of booze. 

You pull your fingers from the paradox of his still chest and press them hard over the record on your shirt. Your heart is beating firmly beneath. You can feel his blood soaking through the white cotton. It’s sticky against the erratic jumps of your heartbeat. 

You don’t love him. You never have. You require him, as a sword does a whetstone. You are less without him. He’s the shittiest sensei, the most terrible teacher. Standing alone, each breath you draw is a reminder of your own failure. 

You’ve always been too soft and you’ve been always too young and the only thing you’ve never been enough of is cool. You spent your childhood struggling to mix beats, going out of your way to scribble comics and tape them to his bedroom door, and scrawling lyrics in the notebooks of subjects you were failing and leaving them open  _ just in case _ he happened to pass by. 

You spent your childhood nursing hunger pains, strifing eternally, splinting broken bones, and watching crimson mingle with tears to leave pink tracks down your jaw. The pain of him bashing your raps was worse than a black eye, though you were no stranger to either teaching medium. The focal point of your childhood has been trying to escape yourself.

He’d attempted to instill in you an insatiable desire to prove yourself. 

And what. What have you amounted to? These days, you blink too long and find yourself cradling your own corpse. You pull dumb shit with a sword and swap meaningless words with a sadist from the other side of the universe. You are nothing but heat and wasted effort. Entropy runs through your veins and keeps your rusted gears running smoothly. You have no sense of your aspect, it is as fickle and unsure of itself as you are. You are not alive and yet you cannot stop dying. Your own web of timelines is cutting off your circulation, twitching you up in neat little nooses. 

Now Bro is dead. What other base aspects of existence must your ineptitude destroy?

You’ve spent your life wanting to be things you aren't. Wanting to be cool, wanting to be a ninja, wanting to be a little brother and a friend and someone deserving of more than bruises. Wanting to be things like the man now crumpled before you. No use stopping now - you’re not going to lie to yourself. You crave heroism the way you crave touch.

You’re not a hero because every hero you’ve known has died like a god and you’re incapable of dying at all, no matter how much you want to. 

You’re not a hero because all the heroes you’ve known are cool and they win and you’re not and you don’t, you won’t ever.

You’ve cradled dozens of limp Johns, Roses, and Jades. All the heroes you’ve known are slaves to death’s selfishness.

Your eyes are still locked on the blade stuck just below his sternum. 

You answer Terezi.


End file.
